"What is this house or that?
Mamma will still have her daughters' love, go where she will." Aubertin replied, "It is idle to deceive ourselves; at her age men and women hang to life by their habits; take her away from her chateau, from the little oratory where she prays every day for the departed, from her place in the sun on the south terrace, and from all the memories that surround her here; she would soon pine, and die." Here the savant seeing a hobby-horse near, caught him and jumped on.

He launched into a treatise upon the vitality of human beings, and proved that it is the mind which keeps the body of a man alive for so great a length of time as fourscore years; for that he had in the earlier part of his studies carefully dissected a multitude of animals,--frogs, rabbits, dogs, men, horses, sheep, squirrels, foxes, cats, etc.,--and discovered no peculiarity in man's organs to account for his singular longevity, except in the brain or organ of mind.

Thence he went to the longevity of men with contented minds, and the rapid decay of the careworn.

Finally he succeeded in convincing them the baroness was so constituted, physically and mentally, that she would never move from Beaurepaire except into her grave.

However, having thus terrified them, he proceeded to console them.